“Not Quite Jaundice”

[This is the first of three brief posts on the experience of being sick, sorta-kinda-like, for four (sorta) days.]

From Catch-22:

Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.

A little over a week ago, I first noticed a not common but still familiar sort of weakness of the limbs. Flu, it said to me. You’re getting the flu.

Which I didn’t really want to be hearing: I didn’t want to hear it from the lips of someone knowledgeable, with pursed lips and horned-rim glasses and the overall demeanor, coincidentally, of a pharmaceuticals salesman, and I really didn’t want to hear it from a vague muscular sensation with no medical diplomas at all hanging behind its desk.

In the first place, I’d had my annual flu shot a few months ago. This guarantees nothing, I’m sure; influenza seems (to us among the teeming, ignorant, and prone-to-alarm masses) capable of becoming something new every six months or so. (Remember swine flu? Asian flu? avian flu? Oh, they’re still out there, no doubt, besetting the unprotected. But I picture them as broken-down palookas with biceps like rubber bands, their eyelids swollen, flailing blindly and hitting something like a target only by accident.)

In the second place, I had no other symptoms of anything flu-like that I’d ever had before. Other symptoms, to the extent that I had them, resembled a weak sort of common cold just as well. I had a cough that came and, for long periods of time, went. One day I had a fever one degree above normal; the next day my temperature was normal; another day it’d be down a degree below normal — and then back to good ol’ 98.6.

True, I was also sleepy as hell. Regular visitors here probably already know that my daily writing time is, roughly, from 5 to 7a.m. —  the first couple hours before getting ready for work. This works well so long as I keep my bedtime dialed back, correspondingly, to no later than 10p.m.

(“And that doesn’t mean start reading in bed at 10p.m., Buster! Put that light out, now!”)

The bedtime part of that hadn’t worked out so well for me in recent weeks, maybe months. And it had begun catching up with me.

On Thursday, at work, in the middle of composing an email message — with the on-screen cursor between two adjacent characters — I suddenly realized that my fingers lay on the space bar. On the monitor, the two previously juxtaposed characters were now separated by about 20 lines consisting of nothing but spaces. Uh-oh.

Thursday night, I told The Missus I wouldn’t be getting up early to write on Friday. I asked her not to wake me up — I’d just sleep until I woke up on my own. I left a message on my boss’s voicemail not to expect to see me Friday. And then I went to bed.

Over the next four nights and days, I probably slept close to 12 hours a day. I appreciated having a percentage like that to throw around, too, because it helped me when people asked — they always ask — “So, what’ve you got?”, “What’s wrong with you?”, and “What have you been taking for it?”

Maybe something about language itself makes an audience uncomfortable with big rickety scaffoldings of phrase and clausework in response to those questions. We prefer one-word nouns and adjectives: cold, flu, headachey, cough, feverish, medicine, pills, suppositories. (Audiences can be such monsters.) A hundred-word explanation starting with Well, I’m not really sure, but it’s something like… is almost guaranteed to induce catatonia. Even if the questioner isn’t there, over the phone, or in email, you can actually hear his or her eyes glaze over, with the impatience of the 21st-century easily-distracted. They wait eagerly for you to pause for breath. Then:

“Oh, that. Lot of that going around.”

“When you’re tired like that? Always lowers your resistance.”

“Lyme disease.”

“Fibromyalgia.”

And so on, a taxonomy of ailments in cataclysmically ascending order. All the way up to my favorite — a disastrous comment to someone with an undisciplined imagination, and several days’ inactivity for it to run wild:

“Uh-oh…”

Anyway, I’m back.